[Top Agency Series] Unlocking the Power of Franchising in Digital Marketing With Cash Miller of Titan Digital

Cash Miller, an expert in leveraging the internet for growing sales numbers, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the digital marketing landscape. As the CEO of Titan Digital, Cash’s commitment extends beyond expertise in web design, development, and online marketing. His role encompasses fulfilling promises to clients, nurturing employees, and charting a course for the company’s future growth.

With specialties ranging from search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing to logo design and branding, Cash Miller’s profound impact on business transformation is a testament to his digital marketing prowess and business acumen.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:27] Advice for building better websites and crafting effective SEO strategies
• [4:26] The impact of Cash’s military background on his entrepreneurial journey
• [11:24] Why should you consider the business environment before starting out?
• [13:58] The importance of cash flows in running a business
• [19:43] The value of innovative marketing strategies in attracting clients
• [26:19] The genesis and evolution of Titan Digital
• [34:18] Tips for managing PPC and running successful social media campaigns
• [37:57] The importance of understanding a company’s goals and structure when working with franchises
• [42:42] How Titan Digital’s franchising model works and who it’s ideal for

In this episode…

Embark on a transformative journey as we delve into the fascinating world of digital marketing and entrepreneurship with Cash Miller. From battlefield experiences to building a thriving digital agency, Cash’s unique career trajectory will captivate you.

Join us as Cash Miller unveils his remarkable evolution from military service to spearheading Titan Digital, a pioneering digital marketing agency. See how he brings his expertise to dealing with challenges in financial management and client dynamics. According to Cash, the growth of his agency is due to the potent blend of innovation, resilience, and seizing opportunities.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, join host Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he interviews Cash Miller, the force behind Titan Digital. He shares his remarkable journey from the battlefield to transforming digital marketing. With insights that span from client dynamics to equipping entrepreneurs for growth, Cash’s story is a testament to adaptability, perseverance, and pioneering success in a dynamic digital landscape.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Cash Miller on LinkedIn
• Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
• Titan Digital
• Titan Digital Franchising
• Inspired Insider
• Rise25

Special Mention(s):

• Jason Swenk
• Todd Taskey

Related episode(s):

• Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast on Inspired Insider
• [Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital on Inspired Insider

Quotable Moments:

• “Management is key when running a business.”
• “Pricing is a mind game that you have to play, not necessarily with the client, but with yourself.”
• “The more you learn about your service, the better informed you’ll be when determining the ultimate price point.”
• “You have to change the dynamic to be able to grow.”
• “You have to have the perseverance to build your own book of business.”

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01  

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders today is no different. I have Cash Miller from TitanDigital.com You can also check his website out Franchise.TitanDigital.com, which we will talk about. But Cash I always like to mention other podcasts people should check out episodes, check out the podcast. And since this is part of the top agency series, I did two episodes of Jason Swenk, which was really interesting, he talked about how he built up and sold his eight figure agency and other one is now he’s been buying agencies and how he evaluates them and how they find them and how they communicate with them and, and build them up. So check that out. Also, Todd Taskey, another interesting one, has a second bite podcast. And he also talks about how he kind of matches agencies of private equity. And he helps sell agencies essentially in the find. Sometimes they make more on the second bite than they do on the first because when the private equity sells, people still have equity in the main portfolio of companies.

So it’s very interesting again, how he sees the journey of agency life that many more on InspiredInsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. And in Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their Dream 100 relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We actually help you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch or run a podcast. We do the strategy, the strategy, the accountability and the full execution and production. Cash, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make sure it makes it easy for the hosts so they could just have the conversation and run their business. So you know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking for ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to Rise25.com. And I’m sure there’s an episode that we’ve produced that is completely free that you can learn anything that you want.

Cash, I’m excited to introduce Cash Miller, he’s the founder and CEO of Titan Digital. And they made the Inc 5000 list. He is an Army veteran with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he spent 20 years as an entrepreneur and their company, I guess, to sum it up, Cash, your company uses the Internet to increase sales results for clients. That means building better websites, that means crafting SEO, that means PPC that means social media campaigns. And they also, as I mentioned, have a franchise model which is Franchise.TitanDigital.com, which we’ll talk more about. And Cash. Thanks for joining me.

Cash Miller 3:13

Thanks. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:16

Just start off first, we’ll get to the army days. And we’ll get to what you did after the army days and then back to the army days and then to current but talk about Titan Digital and what you do.

Cash Miller 3:27

Well, I mean, we’re full service, you know, we build a lot of websites, we have like 600 or so clients and give or take, you know, a couple here and there. But, you know, we’re a digital marketing agency. So yes, we help people with SEO pay per click, we do a lot of programmatic programmatic advertising. Now, you know, for companies, we deal with a lot of different industries. And such, you know, I always like to say we’ve kind of dealt with everything under the sun.

Because we’ve helped recruit truck drivers for companies and students for schools, we’ve done, you know, things in the retail area, we have like a lot of Ace Hardware franchises as an example, as clients. And we’ve dealt with a lot of insurance. So we help sell a lot of policies over the years. And so, you know, our primary thing is lead generation for these different types of companies. But in some cases, it’s brand exposure. So it really depends on the goals of the company, but if it’s digital related, you know, we are doing it.

Jeremy Weisz 4:26

You know, you have such an interesting timeline of, you know, the army. Then you had Miller Casino services, which we’ll talk about the army, then digital agency. So the second go around your Sergeant army. What was the deciding factor? What were you thinking you were gonna do next? Why digital agencies?

Cash Miller 5:00

Okay, so it goes kind of back to The military and such. And so it was about 2007. I was burned out from what I was doing. I built up a decent sized company in Las Vegas, we did a lot of contracting work for restaurants and casinos and stuff, doing restaurant remodels, seating and stuff. But I was very burned out. I had been, you know, it’s, it’s not an easy business to be in, we’d become the largest company in the city for it. But I was done. I was toast. And so I decided, like, what am I going to do instead? And I said, I can’t do this business thing anymore. Yeah, like, I’ve been doing it about eight years at that point.

And I’d been in the military previously for three years in the 90s, and stuff. And I served in Germany, I deployed to Bosnia and stuff when I was there. And I said, Okay, well, I’m married, I’ve got a, you know, my son, I’ve got to make sure I’m taking care of it. And I need something that’s like a career. So let me go back to something I already met. I know what to expect. And it was 2007. And I knew what to do. I knew if I joined. Iraq was in my future at the time, possibly Afghanistan, which both end up happening now. But I’m like, okay, but I’m gonna make a career.

This is I’ve got three years done, I’ll do another 1720 years out, I’ll retire and everything. It took about not even a year for me to start getting the entrepreneurial itch again and saying, Okay, I need something, because I was getting ready to go to Iraq, actually. And I was like, I need something to occupy my time a little bit when I’m not working. Yeah, because you have some downtime, and there’s not a lot to do. Yeah, so I’m like, Okay, let me take everything that I learned in those eight years. I like to say that, you know, let me share all my mistakes and what not to do in business, you know, and I’ll put it online.

Everybody’s getting online. And now I knew nothing, you know, besides surfing the internet, like everybody else. I didn’t have any specifics. And so I said, Okay, let me I’m gonna, I’ll put content on. I see a bunch of websites, people are putting out you think magazines, like entrepreneur names and stuff. And I was like, well, there’s other people starting brand new ones, right. So I decided I’ll build one, I’ll write a bunch of articles for it. And that’s what I did, you know, in my spare time, and then of course, you put something out?

Jeremy Weisz 7:16

Do you set the scene? For me? You’re in Afghanistan at this point. You’re in Iraq, what does your environment look like when you’re in Iraq?

Cash Miller 7:30

So I was on a base in Baghdad, actually, well, I like the worst areas. It’s called Solder city. And we’re on a base, those notice Bob, rest of Maya, and we’re there, there’s four or 5000 of us living there, right? You’ve got walls all around you. It was an old, like, Iraqi training base or something. And so we’ve got these, like, really horrible barracks that we’re living in. And the first three months I got there, you know, like, every day, you’re scrambling for a bunker, because borders are, you know, there were improvised mortars being fired over our walls. Yeah, every single day. Yeah. And so you’d be you know, you’re at the chow hall, you’re trying to eat lunch or whatever. And suddenly, the alarm goes off anyway, everybody scrambles, there’s like an explosion or something that you hear an explosion and stuff. And, you know, so you have that kind of in the background.

And of course, you’re doing your day job stuff, whatever it might be, you know, I had various things, you know, my I was in the support unit. So we would go on the road, we would have to supply other bases and stuff we would have to do, you know, everything, you know, we have em wraps and stuff, and you, you know, be a turret gunner or a driver or something, you know, everything was, you know, everyday be a little different. And you and a lot of what my unit did would be missions. In the middle of that night, we were known for putting out barriers. So, you know, when you’d see images of Baghdad and stuff, and you see all these like highway looking barriers, except that they’re extremely tall.

Yeah, well, they were to stop IEDs vehicle was known as a V bed, you know, so somebody, you know, souping up a car or something with a bunch of explosives that would ram a convoy. So we would go out every night, we’d leave at like eight o’clock, and we get back in the morning and stuff. And so you go out and we would take cranes and stuff. And we were laying those things everywhere. We said, I heard something like we laid. We put up like a million tons or something. Yeah, in 12 months. Yeah, it was constant.

Jeremy Weisz 9:40 

So when you get up in the night, like when you were doing that? Were there people interacting with you or was there a threat to your safety during that time?

Cash Miller 9:50

Well, you mean like the locals and stuff? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we had people that I would interact with that were either on the basis that we were the head. We’ve checked You know, the checked out that had permission to enter the base. And also, when you were on missions and stuff, you would have locals, because what we would end up doing is, when we were running those particular missions, we would drive to the middle of a city, wherever we had orders to go put these barriers up.

So we would actually go to another base, we would load these, you know, 2000 4000 pound, you know, like, massive concrete barriers on the back of our trucks, and then we would take them out, and so we’d have to stop. And so the entire night, you know, you’re there. And it’s like, 10 o’clock at night or something and you’re either unloading your truck, or you’re scanning the whole area to see, you know, for threats. Yeah, and you get people still out there.

Jeremy Weisz 10:40

Cause it’s not like you can move that fast with like, you have tons of weight on your vehicle, it’s not like you can just race off. So it seems pretty dangerous. If someone wants to do something. Yeah, we would,

Cash Miller 10:51

You know, they say that the thing is we’d go in these, like, back alleyway areas, or sometimes on main roads, but we’d be stopped by our entire convoy of vehicles. And we would have, you know, people, you know, gun trucks and stuff to guard us against, you know, threads and whatnot, but they never assigned us infantry, you have to go to go like clearing buildings or anything around us, it was watching out, scan the area, keep an eye out for threats report, if you see something, otherwise, get the stuff off your truck as fast as you can. So we get out of here,

Jeremy Weisz 11:24

I just want to set the scene because like you weren’t working like in a nice office building right? In these articles, right? You’re in this crazy environment while you’re doing this?

Cash Miller 11:34

Yeah, when I would come back, like if I had off time, the next day and stuff. Yeah, I shared a three man room. And that room was all of about 150 square feet or something like that. It was, yeah, like, say, their Old Barracks, the buildings were probably 50 years old or more. And you were lucky to have an air conditioner, because it was as hot as possible. But you got to you know, you’ve got to bed and you got your stuff shoved on underneath. And when you have some downtime, I would be there and I would be working on the website, you know, I would be writing content for it and stuff before content became what it became.

Yeah, I’d say it was, you know, early days of content, marketing and everything. And I’m like, okay, here, let me write down, let me write an accounting article or a marketing article or a management article. And that’s what I ended up doing, you know, during that period, you know, while I was there, and I was able to build out that site. Yeah. But of course, then eventually, it’s like, okay, now I have a site, what do I do to get people to actually look at it. And I started studying SEO. Yeah, and this is, you know, nowadays, you’ve got courses and stuff you’ve got, you’ve got tons of courses, you know, on LinkedIn, and other platforms, but you’ve also got universities teaching this stuff.

Back, then you’ve got basically whatever anybody else was sharing and putting up to, you know, you know, on how to rank art, you know, content, websites, you name it, how do you optimize? You know, it was still very early, and people, you know, weren’t what they had become, you know, and so it’s exploded since the last decade plus, but back then, you know, you’re trying everything to see what works and what doesn’t. And there’s nobody saying, Hey, do this, this this. Very rare. Yeah, there’s, those are some of those people who became true experts. Yeah, that you ended up following and learning from but there was not that

Jeremy Weisz 13:26

many of them. So at that time, you’re in the army. You’re talking about what you should not do, some of your experiences from the Miller casino services company that you built up. And by the way, you have big big clients like MGM and, and other restaurants and hotels. So we’ll talk about how you parlay that into the digital agency, but just talk about what you should not do? What are the things you learn that you should not do from that company?

Cash Miller 13:58

Well, one of the things you know, one of the biggest lessons that you learn in business is, you know, profit. Yes. Cash flow is more important. Yeah. Like, you can be profitable on paper and go broke. Yeah, you can, you know, so you always had to watch your bills. Yeah. And what you were, you know, timing things and whatnot, because, yeah, we were heavy and having to buy materials for people, but you had people that had to pay and when you’re dealing with, especially big clients and such, they’re not necessarily on your schedule for paying their bills. So it was a huge lesson. Yeah. Management, you know, consider whenever you’re getting into a business, who you’re going to deal with, yeah, like there are, it’s, you know, you’ve got a blue collar world, you’ve got a white collar world, you know, you’ve got people that are college educated and people that might be you know, through trade schools for nothing. Yeah. So who do you want to deal with on a daily basis?

Because it’s like, and it’s not an educational thing. It’s somewhat of a recruitment thing. Okay. So You know, when you have people that are trade laborers and stuff, some of the trades have problems with people showing up. And that’s just what it is. Okay. And so I say it’s not an education thing, but the education kind of correlates with certain businesses and those businesses present different challenges, then, you know, you had then you might have if you weren’t dealing with college grads and stuff, now, college grads will be a whole different, you know, another challenge in their own, but what you’re going to face is different is the idea. Yeah, so you have to consider when you’re getting into business, what do you want to deal with, and who I say, large corporations, we deal with a lot of small businesses now. And one of the lessons I learned is getting paid by credit card.

So you’re paid out, because we’re paid upfront for our services, versus what we were doing, you know, what I was doing previously, you could wait 60 days after you were done with the project or longer to get paid, and you’d have to pay your suppliers. Yeah. So that’s where Cashflow comes in, you’re showing out to keep your suppliers happy. But you’re Yeah. And when you deal with big companies, and you’re not a big company, that’s another thing is, you’re not the top of the priority list, and you’ve got no leverage with them. You know, you need them, they don’t really need you. So you want to keep those kinds of things in mind. Yeah, and how do you market a small business and such, you know, how do you? What kind of approach are you going to have to take every business is like really can be very different?

If, you know, with large corporations versus small businesses, yeah, we had to, you know, I got into different casinos and such and dealt with them, because of who I developed relationships with, I found one of the best things is they would move. Yeah, you’d have a chief engineer at a large casino, go to another Casino. Well, if you’ve got a good relationship, they’ll take you with them, and you’ll be able to build, but you build a relationship with the person that’s going to take their place too so you keep the current business and you add something new. With restaurants, we actually developed a gimmick to get in the door. We convinced general managers it was like, I’ve never seen a like, they always need seating redone and stuff, they get tears and all that.

And what we wanted to do was all the maintenance work, you know, so the gimmick we developed was so ridiculously simple, but nobody had ever thought of it. We would take and get acid, we go to the GM, we’d say, hey, look, you’ve got these maintenance issues, we’re willing to take care of stuff. And what we do is an inspection. Yeah, and give us a floor plan, we put together a folder for you. And once a month, we’ll come out and inspect. And when we do that, we’ll mark off which ones are kind of like stages like this is really bad, do it now this is this could wait another 30 days and stuff like that? Well, nobody was offering that kind of a service. We were offering it because it was guaranteed work. We just picked out a restaurant we hadn’t been to.

And we would know that something was going to be bad. And so when we didn’t have major projects and stuff, we would just up the level of inspections, so that we would get more of the maintenance work. Yeah. And nobody was doing such a thing. So when we came around with something novel, it was like, hey, yeah, I’ll listen to that shirt. It was literally a floor plan, you know, in a clear plastic, so you could mark on the sheet and a little white folder. But they do but I had 100 restaurants because of that little book.

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